The Man That Would be King
by Sunday Coma
Summary: Set sometime after the first movie, Magneto's in prison. That leaves a lot of time for memories he'd rather not remember and thoughts he'd rather not have. SongFic.


Disclaimer: -"Gentlemen, progress has never been a bargain. You've got to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man behind a counter who says, 'All right, you can have a telephone; but you'll have to give up privacy, the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote; but at a price; you lose the right to retreat behind a power-puff or a petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline,"  
  
Author's Greeting: This is a fiction for Magneto. That's right, the Master of Magnetism. I just haven't seen enough fictions loving it up for him. So here it is. I don't know if it's been done before with the same song and if it has, I apologize.   
  
Author's Note: In the comics, after being imprisoned in Auschwitz, Magneto married a gypsy woman named Magda and had a child with her named Anya. Magneto was not allowed to rescue Anya from a fire so he lashed out with his powers at the villager's. Magda fled, terrified of him and his powers. Just for all of you who didn't know, so you wouldn't be left in the dark.

_Italtics-Song Lyrics_

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"The Man That Would be King" by Thanx4reading

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The aged man squirmed restlessly, trying to find even a fairly comfortable position in the transparent, plastic, chair that seemed so resistant to relent, disallowing even an ounce of soothing relaxation.

His head, adorned with his wispy, thin, white hair, hung unhappily and he conceded, swinging his legs over and turning back to face the white table before him. The chair forced his back into an uncomfortably erect and level posture that made it extremely difficult to immerse himself in the book that he held in the hands that were gnarled and spotted by time, his own.

No one knows what it's like

To be the bad man

He was imprisoned, rendered helpless in his state of captivity by the plastic cell built especially for him.

He had not meant to end his crusade for mutant superiority here.

Victory had been denied to him by his Charles Xavier, his oldest and closest friend.

The phrase "Et tu, Brute?" had never resounded so loudly nor so bitter in his mind as it did now.

A great pain erupted in his lower back, interrupting his track of thought, as it spread quickly through the rest of his body, causing a small groan of frustration to tumble from his slightly chapped lips.

The man known as Erik Lehnsherr closed the book titled "The Once and Future King", laid it flat on the transparent table, and allowed his hands to reach for his back and massage the bolting ache away.

As that subsided, another great agony arose.

An ailment that had affected the mutant for many years, growing with every lost loved one. A cancer that proved harder to keep at bay with the passing of every God forsaken day.

Erik knew his memories to be more torturous than anything imagined by those plagued solely by physical pains.

To be the sad man

Behind blue eyes

His hands came up to cover his face and hide his eyes as if to conceal him from the images of the faces that swam on the inside of his closed eyelids, sheathing his piercing, icy blue gaze.

The tear-stained face of his mother floated along the edge of his consciousness as it always did whenever he had a quiet moment for reflection. As always, the details of her face were blurred, a direct result of time's thievery.

When he recalled her face from his childhood, it was relaxed into the lines of hearty laughter, a simple kind of beauty and compassion in the expression. Her face emanated everything that the countenance of a good mother should. The personification of maternal warmth and comfort.

What a tragedy was it that the picture that he more often conjured was of her eyes erupting tears and her screams sounding wracked with pain, as if they had had to claw their way up her throat itself.

The men bustling between them to pull them apart, barking in that hideously guttural German, the rain pouring down upon the scene like pounding bullets and the water permeating through his thin overcoat, numbingly cold against his skin. The mud splattered up on his legs as he watched his father clamp his hand over her mouth, her outstretched hands and her soul-wrenching screams beginning to formulate his name in cries of desperation that only a mother can feel when being separated from her child. The black metal gates twisting and creaking as if they, too, were screaming in fear for the family.

He swallowed hard enough to choke back the torrent of hatred that flooded his senses at these thoughts, making the skin around the corner of his left eye twitch.

He remembered his time in Auschwitz well.

One does not forget being a victim no matter how many years pass by.

And no one knows

What it's like to be hated

To be fated to telling only lies

The same discriminating hate fell upon him and his kind now once again and he was the only one able to oppose the future that would be guaranteed if Xavier continued upon this foolish trail of "common acceptance" and integration.

How long would it be before the Homo sapiens tried, once again, to herd his kind into camps?

Xavier had said that his machine killed. That Senator Kelly was dead. Did he honestly think that he had not suspected from the beginning? Of course, the only way to secure the cooperation of certain elements was to lie and make as if this was just a harsher way of achieving a goal. Not a way of eliminating the problem en masse.

Would he rather the mansion bursting full of his precious children slaughtered? Would he prefer their graves unmarked and their deaths considered a good riddance? A cleansing of the human race. Liberation from the future of abominations dirtying the gene pool.

But my dreams, they aren't as empty

As my conscience seems to be

If the future came down to genocide, it would not happen to his people. Not again. Not ever again.

He would do everything in his power to ensure a good future for his people. One where the children could practice their powers openly in their homes so that they would be fully capable of control by the time of their adolescence and be fully accepted by their home.

I have hours, only lonely

These long hours spent in the prison cell were often doused with thoughts of what the world could be like today if he had succeeded.

My love is vengeance

That's never free

No one would ever have to see the face of their beloved mother torn by fear, shredded as if the Devil himself had resurrected himself from Hell to destroy their reality. Nor the face of their father, once proud, unrecognizably drawn with worry and a certain tint of self-preservation.

No one would ever have to be restrained from rescuing a loved one.

No one would ever have to lose someone for fear of his or her capabilities.

No one would ever have to suffer as he had.

No one knows what its like

To feel these feelings

Like I do, and I blame you!

No one would ever have to oblige humanity's ignorance or stupidity. Their fear of anything different. Their conformism to ideals and then hypocrisy in action.

No one bites back as hard

On their anger

Therefore, he had dedicated himself to using their own methods against them and now they accused him of being a monster. The irony was almost as hard to swallow as his indignation at the injustice.

He pushed back these feelings of quiet feelings of sullen outrage as he did the feelings of grief for those who inhabited the Earth only through his memories.

It did no one any good mourning for those who are dead when you can do nothing to retaliate but to obey the rigid monotony required by prison regulations.

None of my pain and woe

Can show through

He wondered which of these guards was carrying the latent mutant gene. Which would be the next to grant the gift to their child and then forsake them as an unnatural scourge upon their pretty planet of Homo sapiens?

He wondered if any of them had parents or grandparents with the same numbers burned for eternity on their forearms.

No one knows what it's like

To be mistreated, to be defeated

Behind blue eyes

"Et tu, Brute?" began another painful series of ricochets through his mind.

Xavier had been there with him in Israel as they worked with organizations helping to recuperate Holocaust survivors.

Charles had been there, seen the wreckage first-hand that this specie's hate could bring.

Their hate could decimate entire groups of people, eradicate entire generations.

And Charles had chosen to defend this weaker branch of evolution, this pathetic younger brother. Chosen to defend these champions of prejudice at the cost of fighting with him, Erik Lensherr. Charles's greatest friend for decades meant less than those pitiful hairless monkeys planning the next great bloodbath against their savior.

"Et tu, Brute?"

As the Reformed Nazis pleaded for forgiveness from their once victims, Charles still visited with him as if it were, once again, a pleasant afternoon and they were agreed to play chess in his lavish home, paid for by his inheritance, of course.

Magneto knew no forgiveness. As he had told Charles, the war was coming and he intended to fight it, as he had fought against oppression in Auschwitz.

He was not sure whether Xavier had considered his words true but it mattered nothing to Erik. He knew them to be as true as the Word of God had once been to him.

No one knows how to say

That they're sorry and "Don't worry,"

"I'm not telling lies"

He had faith in Mystique. She would abandon neither him nor their cause.

He sighed, disgruntled.

These ponderings left no room for reading and he retreated to his bed. As he found the proposition of becoming comfortable here an equally difficult task of ambiguous comprise, the portrait of his mother flashed quickly, faded, across his psyche.

And he muttered a simple Jewish prayer under his breath for the salvation of her soul. If there was one who deserved his continued faith in God, it was her. His mother, once his gentle consolation and promise of a good and just world, now his driving force to make the world that way for his people.

No one knows what it's like

To be the bad man

To be the sad man

Behind blue eyes.

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Author's Note: You know you want to review. You know you do. Did you know that it's scientifically proven that those who review are more likely to win the lottery? REVIEW!


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